The Poet on anxiety is the grain reading the wind

The mountain shuts no door. It just sends the bill, and every bill is written in angles.

Go straight up and you become a rope pulled from one end. Everything in you agrees. That is the trouble with agreement.

Lay a palm along old oak, with the run of it. The wood says yes, yes, yes in a single accent, a whole life spoken in one direction, the way a dry riverbed still speaks of rain.

Turn the palm sideways. Nothing there. Not emptiness: a held breath in the shape of a missing beam.

This is what sits in the chest at four a.m. It isn’t the storm. It’s the map of every place the storm would find no one home.

The tundra, refused its depth, spread out. The slope refuses even that. Sideways is the expensive word. No trade is offered, only the toll.

So the body learns to listen with its weak side. A tree in westerly country takes the first east wind the way a foot takes a stair that isn’t there, dropping through the place a step should be before any word for stair arrives.

That jolt is not a warning. It is a reading. It is the instrument finding out what it was tuned to by the note it cannot sound.

And so, the turn. It isn’t retreat, and it isn’t the flat ground’s loose, uncommitted ease. A little way left, gaining height. A little way right, gaining height. Each corner lays one thread across the grain the gradient meant to tax out of me.

Slow, they say. You turn too often. Yes. Every turn is a stitch.

The fast climbers reach the ridge like arrows, beautiful, all point, and one sideways breath snaps them at the shaft.

I get there later, crosshatched, unlovely, worried into a weave.

The fear never leaves. It just stops being a cliff and becomes a compass that only ever points toward what I can’t hold.

I turn, a little, toward it. Then back. Then up.